R J O’Hara reminds UD of this essay by Key West inhabitant Annie Dillard on writing. Let’s see if she’s got something useful for us.

Write as if you were dying. At the same time, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. That is, after all, the case. What would you begin writing if you knew you would die soon? What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?

Quelle downer! I’d rather write as if I were living if you don’t mind. I mean, I take the point that I should aim for non-triviality (I guess – though I can think of plenty of essays about absurd teeny things that I’ve loved.), but must we be so grim? And it’s not the case that we’re all terminal patients. Terminal, to be sure, but I understand by patient someone hospitalized. And who says dying people become enraged at anything other than profundities? The classic scene of dying people shooing away well-meaning clergy should tell you something.

She is careful of what she reads, for that is what she will write.

Absolutely. Writers have an intense and interminable relationship to other writers, always circling around and rereading inspirations. It’s important to choose well. You know UD‘s prose obsessions. Feel free to share them.

Every book has an intrinsic impossibility, which its writer discovers as soon as his first excitement dwindles. The problem is structural; it is insoluble… Complex stories, essays and poems have this problem … – the prohibitive structural defect the writer wishes he had never noticed. He writes it in spite of that.

Exactly what John Banville says here. One will always fail. And it’s partly because of this that Dillard goes on to make her strongest point:

One of the few things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water. Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you.

Not to be trivial, but UD’d call this the Scrabble rule. Veteran players know not to hoard, hoping each turn for the G that will enable them to make a seven-letter word. Always go with your strongest hand, now.

Dillard’s right that this is true of writing too. Just do it.

This is easy to say, though. The problem of constraint – verbal and otherwise – lies very deep. UD has noticed that many smart and talented people over the years develop comprehensive internal brakes. She knows not why, but there are brilliant singers who do not sing, dancers who do not dance. She presumes this odd repression has to do with the complex balances needed to succeed in other things. Psychologically, you find yourself unable to pursue your brilliant corporate litigation career and play the guitar. Or maybe it’s a time thing. You just don’t have time. And maybe instead of the musical release, you take an easier chemical one — since, whatever you do, UD assumes you need your share of disinhibition…

“[T]he draftsman must aggress.” Yes. But notice how many drafts are about the failure or errancy of that energy. We may want the writer to “magnify and dramatize our days,” as Dillard claims, to “illuminate and inspire us with wisdom, courage and the hope of meaningfulness,” but we shouldn’t be surprised when the writer gives us something smaller and sadder.